Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a novelist, feminist and a writer. She thought the human struggle to be free. Women are not women by birth but society later makes a female a woman. She did not consider herself a philosopher but she had a significant role in feminism and existentialism. 

        Her The Second Sex is a book , in which Beauvoir  discusses the treatment of women throughout history. Like many of her associates, she believed that socialist development and class struggle were needed to solve society's problems, not a women's movement. 

         De Beauvoir's prominent open relationships overshadowed her substantial academic reputation. Beginning in 1929, de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were partners and remained so for fifty-one years, until his death in 1980. De Beauvoir chose never to marry or set up a joint household and she never had children. This gave her the time to advance her education and engage in political causes, to write and teach, and to have lovers. 

       In 1944 de Beauvoir wrote her first philosophical essay, Pyrrhus et Cinéas, a discussion of an existentialist ethics. She continued her exploration of existentialism through her second essay The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947); it is perhaps the most accessible entry into French existentialism 

        The Second Sex, first published in 1949 in French , turns the existentialist mantra that existence precedes essence into a feminist one."One is not born but becomes a woman" With this famous phrase, Beauvoir first articulated what has come to be known as the sex-gender distinction, that is, the distinction between biological sex and the social and historical construction of gender and its attendant stereotypes. Beauvoir argues that "the fundamental source of women's oppression is its historical and social construction as the quintessential" Other. 

        De Beauvoir wrote popular travel diaries about time spent in the United States and China and published essays and fiction throughout the 1950s and 1960s. She published several volumes of short stories, including The Woman Destroyed, which, like some of her other later work, deals with aging  .In the later stages of her career, De Beauvoir devoted a good deal of her thinking to the investigation of aging and death. Her 1964 work A Very Easy Death details her mother’s passing,similarly  Old Age (1970) analyzes the significance and meaning of the elderly in society .A Farewell to Sartre (1981), published a year after his death, recalls the last years of her partner’s life. wikipediya/Simone de Beauvoir